Yu kun's questions

In Hopf’s article p 336, “How can it be justified that the personal rights of a criminal should be less respected in sociology than those of an average citizen”? It reminds me the right of a reporter. I am wondering if it is a privilege. The Upper classes (I mean the press or researchers) always make rule beneficial for themselves. The rule was made by the researchers, therefore, it is nature for them to ask more rights than average citizen.

In Altheide & Johnson’s article (p 289-290), they list some problems about validity: VAC VAI VAG VAL VAR VAS. Though they indicated that the criticism on the validity is from the insiders of qualitative approaches, it seems that the positivism also criticize the qualitative research from those perspectives. In addition, though the quantitative research reduces the bias as much as possible, it still has those faults.

Altheide & Johnson indicated the “reflective turn” is from the insiders of the qualitative approach. In fact, there were a lot of debates between the qualitative approach and the quantitative approach. Did the “reflective turn” mean the qualitative approach adjusted its route to follow the step of the quantitative?

In addition, those faults indicated by the authors also exist in the quantitative approach. Do they believe that the symbol has more validity than the text? In my personal opinion, I don’t agree with that.

In p 296, “Even the most ardent social science wordsmiths are at a loss to transform nuances, subtleties, and the sense of the sublime into symbols.” Then Altheide & Johnson proposed the concept “ tacit knowledge” and exemplify Harper’s case using photography to study a local craftsman. However, in my opinion, it depends on different situations to use different communication tools. In this case, photograph can increase the validity of this study. It doesn’t mean that photograph can increase the validity in every case. In most cases, the text is more capable of conveying the meaning than the image.